Observability Practices for Reliable Systems

Three Pillars of Observability

Collect logs, metrics, and traces and ensure they are correlated and searchable to troubleshoot incidents quickly.

Operationalize

Create runbooks, define SLOs, and integrate alerting with escalation paths to reduce incident time-to-resolution.

Make Observability Actionable

Link alerts to runbooks and post-incident reviews so teams learn from incidents and close the loop on reliability improvements. Invest in queryable storage and dashboards that empower engineers and SREs to answer production questions quickly.

Distributed Tracing

In microservices architectures, distributed tracing is essential to visualize the path of a request across services and identify latency bottlenecks. Ensure trace context is propagated correctly across all service boundaries.

Cultural Shift to Observability

Encourage a culture where developers own the reliability of their code. Observability should be a key part of the development lifecycle, not an afterthought for operations teams.